Tuesday, February 13th – Outside In Theater, Los Angeles, CA
I’m dropping in on an Idiot Workshop class, making up for lost time after missing a class while on the road in the Midwest. It’s an opportunity to get into my body, leave my brain at the door, and focus on not letting my instincts get in the way of my ideas.
At the end of class, the instructor has us all sit in a circle and talk about what we’re getting out of the work thus far. My answer is something like this: I think that I had a preconceived notion of what doing “clown class” would entail, and I have had those notions completely dispelled by the actual work itself. I started dabbling in clown after seeing it done extremely well at Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. I’d been interested in clown work for years (mostly because an improv teacher told me “you move funny” in 2013) but never had the time to take any classes. I came in wanting to work a different muscle than stand-up, to maybe figure out how to control my body on stage a little better, to expand my comedic horizons. I thought I was supposed to be big and loud and highly physical. It turns out that I am more effective small, soft, close to “me” but with something abnormal happening.
My clown colleague Alisha once told me I seem normal but am hiding something deeply strange under the surface. Fewer observations have resonated more.
What I am getting out of Idiot work is not a bodily control, but more of a bodily understanding. I am becoming better at recognizing that different impulses come literally from different places on my body, and that following those impulses in performance leads to some better form of freedom on stage. After thinking I’d spend a lot of clown class moving like the inflatable wacky waving guy outside of a car dealership, this revelation was the last thing I expected.
Wednesday, February 14th – Coffee Commissary, West Hollywood, CA
I tell Jared this while we get coffee, somewhere in the middle of a conversation we’re having about working the clubs in Los Angeles. He reached out a few days ago asking for advice on how to “play the game,” which is a topic that can’t really be talked about effectively via text message. So we are here at my old neighborhood coffee shop, chopping it up.
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